Ex-employee explains the biggest difference between Google and Facebook

They are two of the biggest tech companies; both associated with communication with technology and working on the core idea of providing information. But, what is the biggest difference between the two? How exactly Google and Facebook differ in their ideologies and execution? Only someone who has seen the best of both worlds could give an idea.

Paul Adams, who is the vice president of product at Intercom, has the experience of working at both Google and Facebook. He has worked at Google for three years between 2007 and 2010 before leaving for Facebook, where he worked between 2011 and 2013.

While both the companies are essentially technology companies that help people communicate with one another and easily find information, Adams says, they think in absolutely different ways, Business Insider reports.

He says that Google is engineering driven- solving hard engineering technology problems while Facebook was more a social psychology company-trying to build richer ways for people to communicate.

By saying that, Adams doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t focused on the engineering aspect, but insists that the ideology of Facebook is often around human communication and the psychology of it and how life has changed from 100 years ago and what does it mean to create a sense of community today using a technology like Facebook.

On the other hand, Google views communication in terms of algorithms and rankings, about how to get the content in the stream.

Adams has helped invent the Circles concept that became one of the core features for Google+ and citing the same example, he says that conversations about getting an algorithm for the stream at Google was similar to the talks at Facebook for its NewsFeed, yet very much different in their approaches.

He further points that messaging and social networks were in Facebook’s DNA from the beginning, but they were a separate initiative at Google.